German coaching legend, Otmar Hizfield, last Monday brought his coaching odyssey close to some of the key stakeholders of Ghana football in a two-hour interaction aimed at defining new perspectives for the management of the game in the country.
Hizfield, who has coached the likes of Grasshoopers, Aarau, where he handled players such as former Ghanaian international, Opoku Nti, Borrusia Dortmund and Bayern Munich and now in charge of the Swiss national team, is in the country to officially launch the allsport.com.gh, a local sports news platform.
Hizfield, one of Europe’s most successful tacticians in contemporary times with 12 European titles under his belt in an entralling moment took his audience down memory lane from his modest beginning when he failed to land a job as a mathematics teacher through the travails of the career to a successful manager.
For him, perseverance and the will to succeed are the key elements that should be the driving force behind every football ambition, and that African teams needed them most if they wanted to reach the ultimate at the global football stage.
“African teams are technically and tactically efficient, but the will to succeed is always lacking at the crucial stage.
“When they beat the big teams they are carried away by such minor accomplishments.We saw it when Cameroun defeated Argentina, the defending champions at the World Cup in 1990, and Algeria also beat Germany in 1982, but they all failed to reach the finals.
“The difference is that the big teams are driven by the desire to reach the ultimate and are not moved by minor achievements,” he stated.
